At 94, E. Carey Kenney's brush is as busy as ever, and the celebrated Pikesville artist who headed the art department at McDonogh School for 33 years before retiring in 1980 is afraid his wife might divorce him if he keeps on painting.

"I've got a double garage and two rooms in the house filled with paintings. Some of them are completed and others are nearly completed," Kenney said with a laugh the other day.

Kenney is excited that McDonogh School, where he began teaching in 1947, is publishing E. Carey Kenney's McDonogh this month.

It was the Baltimore County private school's campus of rolling hills and fields that became his inspiration for the sketches, watercolors and oils that fill the 100-page book. It was there that he escaped the noisy everyday world and withdrew to the woods and fields, and contemplated the natural world as well as old barns and houses.

Kenney's love of those fields, streams and woods was so apparent that he was seldom seen without his sketchbook as he made his way around campus.

Or "by the late afternoon's light with his easel set up in a cornfield, capturing the luminous sunset on the fields before him," Stiles Tuttle Colwill, a former student of Kenney's who graduated in 1970, wrote in the book's foreword. "He was, in our eyes, the Andrew Wyeth of Baltimore."

"Coming to McDonogh was the best thing that ever happened to me," Kenney said.

Kenney, born in Pittsburgh, moved to Baltimore with his family in 1931. A 1932 graduate of Calvert Hall College High School, he earned a fine arts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1936.

"I wasn't from an artistic family. I think my dad would have liked to have been an artist," Kenney said. "But I decided early on I didn't like the idea of working, and he supported me in attending art school, where I had a wonderful time going to parties and chasing girls."

During the late 1930s, Kenney maintained a studio on West Franklin Street where he taught adults how to draw and paint.

Early in 1941, he was drafted into the Army, and while in training, Kenney illustrated a book, Khaki is More Than a Color, that caught the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt.

He was sent to Italy, where he served with the 29th and 85th Divisions. "I was a young lieutenant when I joined the line at the Battle of Monte Cassino and spent two years in Italy in combat and didn't even get a scratch," he said.

Kenney's wartime decorations included the Bronze Star.

After the war, he returned to Baltimore and the Maryland Institute, where he earned a teaching certificate.

While at the institute, he met and fell in love with another student, whom he married in 1949. "Joan said she saw me on a balcony and fell in love with me. She gave up painting to raise our five kids and look pretty," he said.

'"When I came to McDonogh, 'Doc' Lamborn was the headmaster - either you loved him or you hated him. Personally, I thought he was a fabulous guy. He hired me."

Kenney's devotion to recording McDonogh's pastoral scenes led to this observation in the book: "A field overgrown with weeds, a trailside patch of wildflowers, are more likely to excite me than the most carefully cultivated garden."

Kenney also painted portraits of faculty members, friends and family members, but he says that that was "hard work."

"My wife also said I couldn't be a full-time portrait painter because I didn't really like people," he said, laughing.

Kenney's work, which also includes a mural in the school's Field House, shows the influence of Thomas Hart Benton and Norman Rockwell, while his nature paintings lean toward the work of Andrew Wyeth.

"I think to some degree every artist is a plagiarist," he said.

"He is so adorable and really self-effacing," said Frayda Salkin, school archivist, who edited the book.

"We printed 400 copies of the book, whose proceeds will go to a fund that will allow a McDonogh student to attend a weeklong class at the Maryland Institute during the summer," she said.

"When I think about my life - which I do a lot these days - I wouldn't change anything," Kenney said. "It's really been a fabulous life."

An exhibition of Kenney's paintings and drawings will be on display from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Nov. 12 to Dec. 15 at the Tuttle Gallery on the McDonogh School campus, 8600 McDonogh Road, Owings Mills.